Julie Wagner > Julie's Quotes

“Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.”
― Scott Stratten, UnMarketing: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging

“Hope is a function of struggle.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.”
― John Holt

“I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“There are no 'if's' in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety - let us pray that we may always know it!”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”
― John Holt

“We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”
― john holt

“To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.”
― John Holt

“Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.”
― William Martin, The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

“Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“(preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say),”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“Instead of waiting for community, provide it, and you’ll end up with it anyway.”
― Jen Hatmaker, For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards

“A man's character is like his house. If he tears boards off his house and burns them to keep himself warm and comfortable, his house soon becomes a ruin. If he tells lies to be able to do the things he shouldn't do but wants to, his character will soon become a ruin. A man with a ruined character is a shame on the face of the earth.”
― Ralph Moody, Father and I Were Ranchers

“Always remember, Son, the best boss is the one who bosses the least. Whether it's cattle, or horses, or men; the least government is the best government. ”
― Ralph Moody

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.”
― John Holt

“Fear, boredom, and resistance--they all go to make
what we call stupid children.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.”
― john holt, Learning All the Time

“When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.”
― Elizabeth Foss, Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”
― Allan Bloom

“Brew coffee or tea, sit with a friend and ask them questions—questions just one step riskier than the last time you talked. As you listen, observe the flickers of sadness or hope that cross their face. Try to imagine what it must be like to live their story, suffer their losses, dream their dreams. Pray with them and dare to put into words their heart’s desires, and dare to ask God to grant them.”
― Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing

“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.”
― Jim Morrison

“Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God— made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child

“Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.”
― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child